Over at I Blame the Patriarchy, the authoress has some interesting things to say about the strange way that the media, the government, and the public has dealt with the “panties on the face” aspect of the torturing of detainees in places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. She writes:
While it’s true that most of the prison photos show women’s underwear used in conjunction with one or more of the other more sadistic tactics, few media reports fail to accord the undies at least equal billing. A military CID caption of this Abu Ghraib photo reads “Detainees [sic] is handcuffed in the nude to a bed and has a pair of panties covering his face.” Here the syntax reveals that “handcuffed in the nude” is deemed the equivalent of “panties covering his face.” Now consider, if you will, the caption I found accompanying this same picture at notinourname.net: “A naked prisoner, chained to his matress-less [sic] bunk, is forced to wear women’s underwear on his head.” Not “a naked prisoner, women’s underwear on his head, is shackled spread-eagle to a bare bunk.” By virtue of its position as the sentence’s predicate, the brutality of the panties is clearly the statement the caption’s author wishes to make about subject, revealing, I contend, the aspect of the photograph to which the writer has experienced the greater emotional response.
The prisoners themselves have expressed a marked sensitivity to the humiliative superpowers of women’s panties, recalling their underwearian experiences in what is to me surprisingly (given all the other godawful shit they’d endured) vivid detail. Back at Salon, detainee H—– says “They gave me woman’s underwear that was rose color with flowers on it.” Another detainee says, “[The] American police [?] he put red woman’s underwear over my head.” Taken in context, their statements suggest they actually view underwear-on-head on a par with being suspended above the floor from shackled hands for 5 hours.
I am not arguing that forcing prisoners of war to wear women’s underwear on their heads is not an act of torture. Clearly it is torture. What interests me is the reason it is torture. How is it that nobody has anything but the utmost sympathy for a fellow shown with a pair of girly skivvies on his head? By what demented code does a swatch of soft pink cotton become an instrument of torment? What makes this particular cruelty stand out from a field of persecutions so squalid they can only have proceeded from massively deranged minds crammed with snuff films and bongwater?
Duh, it’s universally and unanimously acknowledged that there is no lower life form than a human female, no bit of her more base than her cunt, and no tangible symbol of that cunt more handy than a pair of her knickers. Clearly, on this point our sadistic American military jailers and their unfortunate captives agree. When you wanna totally humiliate, degrade, and dehumanize a dude, just call him a girl.
Yesterday, I wrote about a psychological study that demonstrated that men are more likely to buy SUVs when they feel their masculinity has been questioned. It seems a fairly trite observation, but in conjunction with the torture we’re committing in our war on terror, and in particular in conjunction with the parts of it that depend on the forced effeminization of the detainees, it leads to a pretty upsetting conclusion. Whenever we let these guys we’ve femi-tortured out into the world, they’re gonna be hella bent on proving their manhood to us.
All forms of torture, in rendering the subject completely powerless and dominated, tend to create an urge in the once-tortured to exercise power and domination over others, but the pink panties seem like just that extra soupon of indignity that might drive a dude from beating his wife (bad) to plotting to blow himself up in a crowded movie theater (very very bad). Yay.
On a related topic, I was never one to get off on abusing other people physically, but at times I’ve enjoyed abusing other people rhetorically and comically. I remember, for instance, a football game in college when a friend and I started shooting spitballs, and insults, at the somewhat nerdy guy in the row in front of us. We didn’t even know the guy, but his confusion, and then his impotent anger, were pretty funny to for quite a while (our drunkenness probably had something to do with it). I felt badly about it later, of course, and it’s not something I ever did again, but it’s worth mentioning because I think we pretend at our peril that the instinct to dominate and humiliate is one that only bad people possess.
